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- angels rioting against nothing (126)
- everything so keen when you come down from solitude. I notice all Seattle with every step I take.
- ...eating icecream cones / thick milkshake(s)
- an eccentric paperseller
- and bits of string & thread
- and wander around unencumbered
- 2 teenage hepcats
- something like my mother
- with big sad italicized eyelids
- selfsame
- I'm comfortable in the backseat (128)
- night falls & the bus roars downroad -- people sleep, people read, people smoke, the busdriver's neck is stiff (129)
- thru the long hot sun of the Sacramento valley in her Sunday afternoon
- the beginnings
- it's the bridge that counts... the coming-into San Fransisco... it's seeing the rooftops of Frisco that makes you excited & believe, the big downtown hulk of buildings... the whole fabulous movie of San Fransisco
- seen from the bus or train on the bridge coming in, the tug at your heart like New York -- & they're all there, my friends, somewhere in those little toystreets... (130)
- in a fantastic crash of sound (128)
- and the jazz of __
- just faintly feminine
- sucking in cigarette smoke (132)
- all summer I've provided myself my own jazz...
- & otay jazz afternoons
- and we forget the brain beat
- by the chinese playground
- to think the sounds will come in
- choruses of french talk
- little tiny aluminum (133)
- looking at him upsidedown
- Sunday in San Fransisco.
- in the gathering cool
- ...thru chinatown duskstreets
- listening to the sounds coming in thru the windows
- ...the noises of the dishes & traffic & chinese -- it is all one big wailing world, all over, even in my own room there is sound, the intense roaring silence sound. (135)
- he's wearing soft smart shoes & looking so cool in the twilight
- he has a face that looks like everybody you've ever known & seen (137)
- sad-sweet, dark... tortured by sidewalks, starved...
- somewhat dull & unmusical ideas... childlike Miles Davis kid, small
- examining the examples of the architecture... alone in the night... & funny soapy candybars & bits of string in his pockets & half out combs & half toothbrushes... completely homeless, always sleeping on someone's couch... no teeth in the front of his mouth whatever... & offers you a piece of peppermint candy & it tastes like soap (140)
- & in the roar I can't hear what he's saying (141)
- everybody reaching for that next kick & there's no next kick...
- and sad regret (142)
- ...like Frank Sinatra, like something New York, like something new in the world...
- incoherently, annoyed
- his back bent all the way... he walks completely bent over, muttering down the hall... they'll bury him all bent in his tomb... (143)
- by a process of osmosis, through our capillary veins and veinlets (153)
- I remember the daydreams of desolation (154)
- Everything is the same emptiness
- (it's Keltic, word cracking in the sea)
- and the way he says mad, m-a-h-d, real Eastern -- real crazy strange from the Baltic alleycats -- real fence-talk... like you hear little kids talking in gas yards around the used tire lots... (155)
- a strange little humble absence of pride
- & we listen to the hmm of the day & the shh of the silence, and finally Cody coughs, just a little... eyes slitted now
- the soft drums / the soft hand-drums
- wallgazed with sad eyes
- Buddhism is getting to know as many people as you can (157)
- sad-eyed, elegant (160)
- 4pm go to the library with a raspberry pill -- dextidrene (160)
- and Lazarus smiles lazy at the stove (170)
- I keep saying words & really mean it -- I'm trying to get Cody to shut up so I can say "God is words" (...) But it's still all words (171)
- until finally purified
- words that we have to describe words
- we buy cantaloupes & grapes and split and walk across the broadway tunnel yelling in loud voices to make an echo, muching on grapes & slobbering at cantaloupes & throwing them away
- So sweet, and so sad, that she has to get up in the morning to her canary in the bright yellow kitchen & know that he will die... reminds me of my Aunt Clementine but not like her at all (200)
- and there'd been elegant conversations in cabs
- with elegant lazy hands hanging, shouting, sometimes inside (from charmed happiness) so his eyes can't help twinkling. his eyes swivel from face to face, big serious brown eyes that if you choose to stare at them he'll stare right back... (201)
- Donald is delicate in a gray suit, laughing
- they were so idly perfect, like, "not as red as a tomato, I hope," or, the crashing way he laughed suddenly (202)
- under the laughter (looking at Cody)
- but the laughter is genuine, and I console myself with the reminder
- it's almost unmannerly the way I wail
- The perfect development of the party runs around the theme how we gonna run the revolution
- at a thank-God moment (203)
- with big serious eyes like Lenin
- And the way he says 'brains,' it all sinks thru us(...) the funny way of the r's(...) thick, sincere r's (204)
- we'll bring parachutes to the poetry reading
- he's a thin elegant guy (205)
- I always remember that as a typical humble beautiful act of friendship & good talk -- Touching knees in the car & all upsidedown we all crane around as Rose strives to park in her slot, slowly
- and a sociable smile is nothing but teeth (206)
- gliding in like an Arab, grinning
- his thin white delicate priest-hand (207)
- & everybody rly senses that he knows something that's been forgotten (208)
- all these buddhist negatives (209)
- I know it will be nowhere but it's the unexpected poetry...
- meanwhile Raphael slouches on the couch & shouts out a reading of his own poems, "Buddha-fish," etc., which he has in his coat (211)
- Lazarus amazes me also the cool way he's passed thru the whole night
- the dialogue of such parties is always one vast hubbub that rises to the ceiling & seems to clash and thunder there, the effect when you close yr eyes & listen, is "bwash bwash crash" as everybody is trying to emphasize their conversation at the risk of interruption or drown out
- the bohemian cramming his pockets with free cigarettes (212)
- it's a long speech he makes which has drunken triumph in it, we're all drunk, but it's also got that bird-pure triumph of Raphael's anyway
- it's written in the Tao, it's the only way - it's the only straight line, right through (213)
- now we own the world, we buy wine on market street & jump all 8 in buses and drink in the back and get off & go on shouting down the middle of streets big long conversations
- Levesque the painter falls down
- it's all drunk & sentimental
- then Lazarus & I dribble ghosts into his notebook with our crazy cartoon pencils. I'd like to see them again, esp Lazarus' strange wandering ghost-lines, which he draws w/ a radiantly bemused smile...
- we cook porkchops in the kitchen & it's already dark. (214)
- as we come down again Raphael is striding thru the moonlit night exactly like an opium-pipe Chinaman, his hands are in his sleeves & his head is bowed & he walks right along, real dark and strange and bent to sorrowful regards, his eyes raising & sweeping the scene, he looks lost like little Richard Barthelmess in an old picture about London opium smokers under lamps, in fact Raphael comes right under the lamp & walks across to the other dark -- hands in sleeves he looks moody & Sicilian, Levesque the painters says to me "Oh I wish I could paint him walking like that" (214)
- and I go to bed, in my sleepingbag, windows open to the cool stars
- in the morning we walk off thru the hot morning thru big cement factories & ironwork & yards. I wanta walk and show them things - at first they complain but then they get interested in the big electromagnets that lift piles of pounded scrap, and dumps em into hoppers, blam, "just by releasing the juice at the switch, the power goes off, the mass drops," I explain to them, "And mass equals energy -- and mass plus energy equals emptiness." (214)
- the maniac he wants the whole bus to hear, if he feels like talking -- meanwhile Simon has a banana he just bought & he wants to know if ours are just as big (215)
- to swerve backwards
- hollering a sentence to us
- she's got a short haircut, she's in bed, she's under blankets, she's sick, she has big sad eyes, she has me play Sinatra louder on the phonograph, she has a whole album spinning -- yes, we can use her car... (215)
- a completely serious little girl (216)
- now Cody seems apparently contented & they play big evil games of chess
- Sinatra, Mario Lanza, Caruso, all sing that bird-pure note of cello-like sadness as is seen in the sad Madonnas - their appeal - Raphael's appeal is like Chopin, soft understanding fingers laid intelligibly to a keyboard, I turn from the window where i'm standing & stare at Raphael playing, thinking "This is his first sonata" -- I notice everybody is quietly listening, Cody in the bathroom & old John Ehrman in the bed, staring at the ceiling -- Raphael plays only the white keys, as tho in a previous lifetime maybe (beside Chopin) he might have been an obscure organist in a belfry playing an early Gothic organ w/o minor notes -- Because he does whatever he wants with his major (white) notes, and produces indescribably beautiful melodies that keep getting more tragic & heartbreaking, he's a pure bird singing(...) it gets so sad, the song's so beautiful, as pure as his utterances, showing his mouth's as clean as his hand -- his tongue's as pure as his hand so that his hand knows where to go for song... (217-18)
- I really have such grandiose thoughts (218)
- "so Chopin got his Urso, and now the poet blows both on piano & language"
- so Raphael yells at me "Dont comb your hair -- leave your hair uncombed" (219)
- and as I stand by the window(...) I realize the greatness of Raphael -- the greatness of his purity, and the purity of his regard for me -- and letting me wear the Cross (219)
- in between those two sonatas
- Irwin, who hits long homeruns left-handed in the windows of the Harlem River Bronx (220)
- "Wake up!" he yells, a Buddhist -- "don't step on the aardvark!" The aardvark is an ant-eater -- "Buddha say: don't bend over backwards." I say to Ben Fagan: "why is the sun shining thru the leaves?" -- "It's yr fault" -- I say: "what is the meaning of this you meditated that yr roof flew off?" -- "It means horse burps in China and cow moos in Japan." -- He sits & meditates with big broken pants -- I had a vision of him sitting in empty space like that, but leaning forward w/ a big smile -- He writes big poems about how he changes into a 32-foot Giant made of gold -- He is very strange -- He is a pillar of strength -- The world will be better because of him -- The world's got to get better -- And it will take effort
- But we're all the same thing (221)
- we're all friends & enemies (221)
- his favorite candies / chocolate triangles / refrigerated / to josh / tightlipped / the movie house / the landladies
- middleclass mexican merchant(...) mud hole backstreets(...) adobe slums
- cowboys shooting toy guns in little dusty hills (236)
- we go back to the house, where I'll sleep in the grass (237)
- I stare into the swimmingpool
- it comes very fast & then it goes.
- with the desolation angels, the poets & characters of the san fransisco renaissance (246)
- some misgivings
- & a resumption of my solitude
- I need solitude & a kind of "do-nothing" philosophy that does allow me to dream all day & work out chapters in forgotten reveries that emerge years later in story form
- searching for a peaceful kind of life dedicated to contemplations & the delicacy of that
- and to meditate upon the world without being imbroglio'd in its actions
- I wanted to be a man of Tao, who watches the clouds & lets history rage beneath
- my experience in the arts of solitude
- they wanted to know why I sleep in the desert (247)
- the years of hiding at home
- under Television floodlights
- sweet little policemen
- I always remember Mexico exciting, esp at 4pm when the summer thundershowers make people hurry over glistening sidewalks which reflect blue & rose neons, the hurrying Indian feet, the buses, the raincoats, little dank groceries & shoe repairs, the sweet glee of the voices of the women & children, the stern excitement of the men who still look like Aztecs (248)
- dark green gloom inside
- hunch-backed & skinny, going thru interminable searches thru coat, drawer, suitcase, under rugs & newspapers for his endlessly hidden stashes of junk (249)
- on finishing a sentence
- that low junkey groan, tremulous & as tho some kind of secret laughter or pleasure that he completed the sentence well
- poking thru his bathrobe pockets(...) the lints
- in a meditation that takes almost 2 minutes, carefully arranged & rearranged... (250)
- from the streets you saw his pink drapes, looking Persian, or like a gypsy's room
- the battered bed sinking in the middle
- his long Daddy long legs stretch out comfortably
- just an electric heat lamp upsidedown
- the outlandish, the perfect, the really simple arrangement only a junkey brain could figure out
- but in the backs of cabs he became mock senile & let his together-knees keel over on mine, and even slumped like a destitute old horseplayer low in the seat & against my elbow (251)
- a great thief
- the old Chinese laundryman
- smoky kerosene heat (253)
- his face is thin, with white hair combed sleekly back with water like a teenager. he wears purple slippers...
- outside the pink curtains the city hums & croons with cha-cha night
- when he falls asleep for a minute I've got nothing to do but think
- into the slums
- sat behind pink drapes of their own
- I had a quiet time
- the histories of people oozing out like long worms across the plaza of the night (260)
- every time we got together the conversation became a poem swinging back & forth
- (he) lectured from the edge of the bed
- a subterranean girl
- excellent eerie drawings
- but I loved him too because of his utterdust broodings. the way he stands hand to brow, wondering where to go in the world. he dramatized the way we all felt. and his poems did that best of all. (261)
- on the verge of catatonia like an older brother now in an institution (262)
- spells (semi-annually) of 'schizophrenic' silence
- besides all that weird interesting naive mysticism, he was rly an angelic kid
- Laz, like myself, also spent whole afternoons staring into space, doing nothing whatever, except maybe brush his hair, mostly just listening to his own mind
- the landladies hung out in the kitchen boiling pots
- in the village below where, at dusk's obscura, boys played sad basketball (271)
- where she takes color photographs
- "Are there ant hospitals underneath the mound?" the 5 of us leaned over the ant villages wondering
- when we all go to heaven we won't even know what the sighin' was all about, or what we looked like (302)
- it's a 10-foot drop from the fire escape to the sidewalk & as i fall i realize it but not soon enough
- in the pots & pans (314)
- in search of an afternoon (315)
- 'perfect simple equipments'
- Sunday morning, I empty of my little tricks to make life livable. An empty orphan sitting nowhere
- ...all the efforts my father had made to make living something to be interested about
- whole parking lots of cemeteries everywhere
- Julien called her Ecstasy Pie (330)
- that tubercular Mexican cough
- a tremendous high giving vent to many colored sensations... "I get many visions at this spot" (346)
- a strange compressed laugh came out of his stomach
- til the floor was littered with the strange Etruscan script of his handwriting
- it's a matter of catharsis (347)
- the afternoon's aperitif cognac (348)
- (in fact I have visions of him)
- telling stories about the world & laughing "Hm hm hm" from the pit of his stomach bending, such an enormous Sherlock Holmes
- ...says Irwin, sluffin' me off
- And it was always cognac, stories, and I'd step out to the garden now & then and marvel at that purple sunset bay (349)
- throwing chickenbones
- "Ah don't bore me with your New England dreams"
- meanwhile the sunsets are mad orange fools raging in the gloom
- ...loving arms of senoritas snowpink piles wait at the foot of the world
- waiting at the mist bottoms
feb 7 2020 ∞
nov 10 2023 +
nov 10 2023 +